Filmtracks Recommends:
Buy it... on the song-only album if you desire a direct souvenir of the film's major musical numbers by John Powell, none of which have much in common with the style of the composer's surrounding underscore. Avoid it... on the score-only album if you demand to hear anything substantially new or spectacularly well-rendered by Powell in his friendly and occasionally majestic, but usually derivative orchestral work. Filmtracks Editorial Review:
Dr. Seuss' The Lorax: (John Powell/Various) No matter where you fall on the political spectrum, it's impossible to argue that Dr. Seuss' 1971 story of "The Lorax" is not a blatant message about the ills of corporate relationships with the environment. When Universal adapted the tree-happy tale to the big screen in 2012, there was a predictable but still entertaining backlash against the picture from America's Fox News Channel and related conservative interests, and Universal prodded these detractors further by flooding the country with a massive marketing campaign for Dr. Seuss' The Lorax that included more than 70 product tie-ins. The advertising must have worked, because audiences defied mixed critical reviews by making the film an overwhelming fiscal success. Whenever adapting a short story into a full-fledged feature film, there is bound to be discontent, and The Lorax padded its length by shifting the focus away from the central interchanges between the Once-ler and the Lorax to the little boy at the beginning and end of the original story (and adding a love interest, his family, another town villain, and many more characters). The central pro-environment message is not only preserved, however, but rather bluntly applied through the help of a musical narrative format highlighted by the song "Let It Grow," one of the single most obnoxious socio-political packages for a children's film in quite some time. Returning with some of the other crew members from 2008's Dr. Seuss' Horton Hears a Who! is composer John Powell (and his assistants), who not only was hired to provide the score for The Lorax, but also five or six songs to be featured as central parts of the story. Powell collaborated with one of the film's screenwriters, Cinco Paul, for these songs (the latter writing their lyrics), and the score's thematic material is partially connected to their melodies. Powell is a veteran of writing the orchestral scores for these types of projects, though hearing him adapt his ideas into the structure of a musical is relatively new. Unfortunately, while the underlying components of the songs are fine (translating into some of the score's most interesting moments), the actual rendering of the songs is truly horrendous. Ed Helms badly over-performs in the role of the villain during his three associated songs (and even the comedic "The Once-ler's Traveling Madness," struck mostly from the film, is insufferable), and the uppity, pop-infused "Thneedville" is merely bait for the teenage crowd. The aforementioned centerpiece of the musical, "Let It Grow," has the attitude of one of those celebrity-magnet world peace songs that is too wholesomely uniting for its own good. While the songs in The Lorax are challenging at best, the rather short score sprinkled in between those song placements is largely in tune with Powell's normal output for this genre of film. Instrumentally, the sound is familiar, a rousing orchestral performance assisted by cooing choir and occasional genre-specific accents. There isn't as much wild deviation between genres and moods in The Lorax as there was in Horton Hears a Who! (the songs provide that dichotomy), but the varying animal kingdom representations in "Truffula Valley Fantasy" (including the simply awful humming fish) and the electric guitar-driven action cue, "Thneedville Chase" (which at least ties the score to those songs), are definitely passages of unique style in this entry. The choral usage reflects the fantasy and tragedy parts of the story well, expressing the hope embodied by the final Truffula seed and the sorrow of the animals in "Valley Exodus." Powell also applies the choir to the orchestra in a pseudo-religious manner for the return of the Lorax at the end of the picture, which makes sense given the imagery's revelation of the character out of blinding light as though he were the second coming of Christ. Some of the song melodies are seemingly impossible to translate into orchestral alternatives, so you hear Powell augmenting those identities with ideas specific to the score. The most frequently applied idea is a fantasy theme ("Ted, Audrey and the Trees" and "Valley Exodus") that sounds suspiciously transplanted from Kung Fu Panda, though an offshoot of this soothing material in the latter half of "Ted, Audrey and the Trees" resides much closer to James Horner's The Land Before Time. The most obvious placement of a song melody in the score comes in "Funeral for a Tree," which translates "Let It Grow" into a tender piano performance for the redemptive finale, with the previously mentioned, religious crescendo for the Lorax's return in the middle. A strong balance of action, fantasy, and tragedy is conveyed by Powell in this score, though its tone is really too disparate from that of the songs to form a truly cohesive whole. That is perhaps justification for the songs and score being released on separate soundtrack albums, still an irritating choice given that both would have fit onto one CD. The tiresome song album, dominated by its many demo versions required to fill a 34-minute presentation, will be nearly impossible for enthusiasts of Powell's score material to appreciate. The score-only product, on the other hand, is a decent listening experience and has roughly fifteen minutes of music that will fit nicely with Powell's similarly friendly but somewhat forgettable children's writing. If you are stuck watching the film, at least you will hear the debut of Brian Tyler's reworking of Jerry Goldsmith's Universal logo music at the outset, arguably a more interesting attraction than what follows.
Music as Heard on the Interscope Song Album: ** Music as Heard on the Varèse Sarabande Score Album: *** Overall: *** Track Listings (Varèse Score Album):
Total Time: 46:07
Track Listings (Interscope Song Album):
Total Time: 34:13
All artwork and sound clips from Dr. Seuss' The Lorax are Copyright © 2012, Varèse Sarabande (Score Album), Interscope Records (Song Album). The reviews and notes contained on the filmtracks.com site may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Filmtracks Publications. Audio clips can be heard using RealPlayer but cannot be redistributed without the label's expressed written consent. Page created 3/22/12, updated 3/22/12. Review Version 4.1 - PHP (Filmtracks Publications). Copyright © 2012-2013, Christian Clemmensen. All rights reserved. |
Varèse Album